Need a book recommendation? Three authors share their favourite books to read next

Who better to ask for your next great read than the people who spend their lives with books? We asked a few authors to share the books they return to, rave about and think everyone should read at least once. From Middlemarch and Agatha Christie to lyrical new fiction and poetry, consider your reading list officially refreshed.

Meg Mason

Author of You Be Mother and Sorrow and Bliss, winner of the British Book Industry Book of the Year, and shortlisted for the Women’s Prize. Her newest work is the much-talked-about Sophie, Standing There (Bloomsbury).

Recommends 

Middlemarch by George Eliot 

I’ve always wanted to be one of those people who can casually mention they’ve read and love Middlemarch. But I was always intimidated by this 900-page classic, failing every time I tried it. The trick—I finally discovered— was to start with the audiobook, then pick up the paperback, going back and forth between the two, and now I can truly say it’s one of my favourite books of all time. 

Hold Still by Sally Mann 

If you have a secret ambition to create—whether it’s writing, music, painting—you’ll find this work by the famous photographer Sally Mann greatly encouraging. It’s all about making your dream a priority and being brave enough to move past those excuses (‘If only I had the time!’) and just start.

The Agatha Christie Cure by Cathy Rentzenbrink

In the aftermath of her divorce, the author Cathy Rentzenbrink decided to read all of Agatha Christie, an author she had loved since her granny introduced her to the novels in childhood (putting a coin in a jar every time she finished one). The result is this part-memoir, part-biography of Christie, which I never wanted to end.

Nayantara Roy 

Author of The Magnificent Ruins (Hachette India), a New York Times Editor’s Choice novel of 2024, among other accolades. Currently being adapted for TV by Universal Television. Her second novel, Sisters of a Halved Heart, was published in June 2026.

Recommends

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett 

Patchett’s extraordinary novel, which opens with a kiss, explodes into a hostage crisis in South America and is, at its core, a paean to love, desire, loneliness, and the surprising spaces in which we allow ourselves to experience beauty—was fittingly once turned into an opera. Here is a novel that soars and transcends, even as its main characters lie still on a floor for most of it.

An Equal Music: A novel by Vikram Seth 

Seth’s (slightly) lesser-known novel, and arguably the most luminous, lyrical of them all. A visceral love story, where music and longing run through every sentence even as his torn lovers ask the question—what happens in the silences that come after devastating turns of fate? You will remain in the emotional grip of this novel for a long time afterwards.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

Desai’s sweeping romance traverses ghosts and art, and undying passion, between landscapes of Vermont, Queens, and the hill stations and cities of India. The book is a profound musing on a modern love that must grapple with bone-deep isolation, assimilation, and identity across cultures and continents, and the aching desire to experience something real. In the end, we are all Sonia and Sunny.

Soumya Mukerji

Editor, writer, and journalist with over two decades of experience. Her debut book of poetry, Cries (Westland), is out now.

Recommends

Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane

Macfarlane makes landscape and language one. From the waters that make the living lore of the endangered wetlands of India to the stories entwined in the estuaries of Ecuador and the coasts of Canada, the writer transforms research and travel into tales that pulse with life, honouring and upholding rivers as sacred lifelines and ancestors alive.

Glass Bottom by Sonali Prasad

A treat in its lyrical telling, the book explores ecological and social rupture through the mirroring of the female body. The themes of transparency and fragility ripple through the interconnected lives of the mother-daughter duos, Gul and Arth, and Luni and Himmo, along the coasts of the tempestuous Arabian Sea, probing what feminine fold and shelter mean.

Cape Elsewhere by Siddharth Dasgupta

A rare and resonant collection of travelling poetry, this new book is a sensory celebration and visual delight. The lyric landscape spreads itself across Poona, Paris, Calcutta, Isfahan, Bombay, Amsterdam, Lucknow, and Istanbul, exploring desire, movement and nostalgia. The poems come alive as palpable currents through the myriad geographies of mind and topographies of contemporary cultures.

Lead image: The authors

This article originally appeared in Cosmopolitan India's September-October 2026 print issue.

Also read: Give your rom-com reads a refresh, and pick up these thriller reads instead

Also read: Can't tell your Circe from your Helen? These books will make Nolan's 'The Odyssey' even better